


Where Kira Means Sparkle

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: God of the Machine [5]
Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: F/M, Friendship/Love, Humor, Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-29 22:53:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15738966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: Anna Jones is hurled into the world of Death Note where Light Yagami never picks up the Death Note. Instead of plotting to become God and how to survive the eternal chess game Anna and Light spend their time bickering about whether or not she is really an alien.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory note that this is not canon to "God of the Machine"

Light Yagami, number one high school student in all of Japan according to his test scores, was best friends with an alien from another dimension.

Of course, no one knew this.

She looked human enough, convincingly human. She looked like an ordinary, Caucasian, high school transfer student who just happened to be in Japan and living with Light for the duration of her exchange program. Nothing about her was too out of the ordinary, perhaps she was a bit tall, perhaps she was a bit thinner than most girls he knew, and perhaps her eyes were a bit too pale of a blue for eyes but nothing that made you stop and stare and mutter to yourself that she was something out of science fiction.

She acted convincingly enough too. She might be fluent in Japanese at a very young age, and without any real reason to be given her apparent heritage, but beyond that she was perfection in her acting. She knew all the nuances of high school teenage social behavior, how to interact with people, how to fit in, and again no one in their right mind would think that she was faking being human.

The sad thing was, Light thought to himself, if he hadn’t seen her appearing out of nothingness in the middle of his bedroom he would have been fooled as well.

This was why Anna Jones bothered him so much and if he was honest it was the reason she was currently his only true friend.

Friends, he didn’t have any, hadn’t ever had any if he thought about it. He had… acquaintances and peers, he supposed he would say. People he would laugh with in the classroom, girls who would casually date him if he asked, people from tennis, people from cram school, just lots of people who only saw what he wanted them to see. All concerned with their test scores and grades, the latest video games and movies, all these things that Light had no interest in whatsoever.

Humanity, he’d decided was fairly boring and somewhat barbaric. It was a terrible thing to say, and it wasn’t true about everyone, and he felt horrible for thinking it but none the less… None the less, he had been thinking it for some time, especially before she had shown up.

He’d seen where his life was headed, he’d seen that proud and golden path as he graduated high school with honors then university with honors and then joined the NPA with honors. He’d looked far into the future, seen him marrying some woman he tolerated at best, but who would please his father and mother. He’d seen that world, and it looked so terribly bleak and empty.

And he was already so terribly bored.

But she wasn’t boring, because she wasn’t human even if she acted well enough to fool everyone around them, and perhaps even to fool herself. Her cover of Anna Jones, the American exchange student, set in place for her conveniently by her or what she claimed to be some higher power, was very far from boring.

For perhaps the first time in his life he found himself interested in something.

He found himself looking her up, tracking down how far Anna Jones went before the paper trail stopped. Did she have friends? Family? A home town? She had all of her documentation but if Light were actually to travel to America, to call up a few homes, would they vouch for a brilliant teenage girl studying Japanese named Anna.

It was a puzzle, one the likes of which he’d never imagined, and meanwhile there was her commentary as well. Her halfhearted attempts to leave Japan that were somehow always wasted, her arguments on how she couldn’t possibly be an alien and if she was one then she was frighteningly good at imitating human behavior but frighteningly bad at making any real progress.

They hypothesized just why she was there.

He theorized that she could be observing humanity, learning their culture. Under the guise of an American girl this was clever, she had a reason to not understand all cultural nuances, but no one would question whether or not she was from another planet.

She’d argued that if they knew the difference between Japan and America then they’d already done a fair bit of research on human nature and had no reason to be sending her in.

Later stage in the plan then, they’d set up a system of observation already, she could be a university student or whatever the equivalent was sent to observe developing life forms.

She said she couldn’t imagine a sentient race sending undergraduates to make contact with other developing sentient life forms; because no one could be that stupid.

Her argument then usually boiled down to the assertion that she wasn’t really an alien, only technically one, and that parallel Earth was more or less the same as his Earth. Beyond some insane deity plucking her from her old life and inserting her into his she was a perfectly ordinary teenage girl who just had the odd penchant for films with robots in them.

He would kindly point out that this was all opinion, and hardly fact.

And they would go on, bickering back and forth, both doing their best but both failing in being truly convincing and only becoming more frustrated as they went on.

They never did reach a conclusion, but then, that was never really the point.

* * *

Being trapped in another parallel universe to Earth could be far worse.

There could be a war going on, there could be an actual alien invasion going on, it could secretly be the Matrix, point being it could be a lot worse than Tokyo in the late nineties. Hell, it could be worse even then that, she had an identity (graciously gifted upon her by the bastard god that had sent her here), she had a place to sleep, she had a sort of friend…

So it could be worse.

But she still liked to complain.

She’d been doing things, not great things necessarily, high school things but she’d still been doing them. She’d had a family, a few casual acquaintances here and there, and she didn’t really appreciate being taken from all of that to a world where she still couldn’t manage to even read the newspaper.

So she went to high school, she somehow got excellent grades in spite of being almost completely illiterate and not knowing a word of Japanese, she went shopping with Sayu, she watched really bad soap operas on television, and she tried to convince Light Yagami that she wasn’t actually an alien sent to destroy his planet.

Not that Light seemed all that concerned by the idea of her destroying his planet. Light was an odd guy, very smart, ridiculously smart, but odd. He didn’t seem to realize this about himself, which on the surface he looked perfect, there was nothing wrong with him but… But if an alien being had appeared in Anna’s bedroom, and she was convinced that it was going to destroy the world, she would be a bit more concerned and proactive than he was.

Light just seemed, mildly entertained by the idea, perhaps even a bit excited. The sad fact of life though was that he was the closest thing she had to a friend, given the fact that he was the only one who knew that she wasn’t from his America and was faking her way through high school.

She didn’t try to look into Light’s thought processes too deeply, down that path lay madness.

So instead she did homework, went shopping, watched a lot of parallel universe Japanese television, chatted with Light, and just waited for something to happen.

Because she didn’t really see the point in all of this.

Despite being in Japan, a parallel world Japan, it was like she was back at home. She still went to school, chatted with friends, ate lunch, did homework, did all of those student like things that normal people do.

If she was going to be an alien she might as well feel like she was doing alien things.

It just bothered her on some fundamental level, that she’d crossed dimensions essentially just to be a high school girl again, worse the high school girl that everyone went to in order to ask if Prince Charming Light Yagami had a secret girlfriend.

Why did anyone care if he had a secret girlfriend?

She didn’t care, she cared more about cross-dimensional travel and appearing in random people’s houses! Also, Light may seem great on the outside, but he was secretly bizarre. He had absolutely no friends, ate lunch by himself, and was completely unconcerned by the idea of an alien taking over his planet.

Seriously, who did that?

She could have gone up to him, after appearing in his bedroom, done the whole “Take me to your leader, earthling.” And he probably would have done it, after trying to explain why there wasn’t just one leader anywhere.

Oh, trying to enslave my people? That’s nice here have some udon.

Anyone who did that had major issues, she wasn’t sure what those issues were, but they had to be quite large. Not as large as being from another dimension without any reason why you were in another dimension, but still large issues.

It almost made her want to believe that she was the one who had been abducted by aliens. That it was a “Slaughterhouse Five” type scenario, where she was in some alien zoo interacting with her more or less natural environment all while her keepers observed her in a giant bubble. It would explain why all of her tickets out of Tokyo kept disappearing whenever she bought them, or why the bus would break down, or why she couldn’t seem to leave.

Light could be an alien, it would explain a lot.

She really wished that she could be back home though, where she had been fairly certain that no one was an alien trying to destroy a planet or run a zoo. She missed those days.

And that was all Anna Jones really had to say about Light Yagami.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anna Jones, resident anticlimactic alien, complains about Light's love life and then her own love life. Light is unamused.

“It’s not that I don’t mind being an alien… Alien-like person,” she corrected herself, “Or that I don’t like Tokyo, nothing wrong with Tokyo just… Light, please, for god’s sake, just pick one to date!”

Light and Anna Jones, the alien cosplaying as your average American exchange student, were walking home from school as they always did, both doing their best to ignore the light snowfall of early winter. It’d been months, Light couldn’t help but think to himself as he looked at her, Anna had arrived out of nowhere inside of his bedroom in early fall, and by all rights she’d depart for her homeland in the spring, but whatever had brought her here (either herself, her people, or something unknown to either of them), Light doubted it’d be content with a mere school year.

All the same, it was almost alarming how used to her he was becoming.

“Just one of them, I don’t know, what about Emi she seems nice-ish? Take her to Space Land or something and make sure everyone knows about it so I stopped getting hassled to set you up on dates you don’t want to go on. Or, worse, where they start suspecting me of being your girlfriend. Seriously, one of your crazy high school moe stalkers threw my homework in the trash! Who does that?!”

And how much his life was starting to resemble one of Sayu’s shojo manga plots.

“I hardly see how this is my problem,” Light stated rather blandly, far more honest and blunt than he allowed himself to be with anyone else, well, perhaps with Sayu, but that was different and even then, there was a certain politeness not to be tossed to the side.

It was almost refreshing, the fact that, since Anna wasn’t human anyway, he didn’t have to put on any sort of show for her.

“Because they’re your obsessive stalkers, Light! And it shouldn’t be my problem either! It’s not my fault I showed up out of a wormhole and was dropped inside of your bedroom! Really, I have nothing to do with any of this, I’m just around… Besides, I know what you’re actually like, and because of it have absolutely zero interest in dating you!”

Light blinked, thought about giving a short and rather harsh retort, and felt a slight quirk of his lips as he threw her own words back at her, “Them’s fighting words, Jones.”

She paled, looked completely taken aback, and finally said, “You are not allowed to repeat things I say to you…. It ruins your whole Bond villain image.”

“Bond villain?”

Anna’s eyebrows raised and she dutifully explained, complete with hand motions as they walked, “Sure, stroking a cat, sitting in a chair, your enemy strapped to a table about to be split in half by a laser, ‘No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

“Why do I have to be the villain?” Light asked, genuinely irritated at this, as he considered himself quite the model citizen and more one of the more morally ethic people he knew. True villainy, the true rot of humanity, was far uglier than that.

“I don’t know you just have that… Almost Hannibal Lector air to you,” Anna Jones said before insisting, “I mean, without the cannibalism, obviously. This isn’t to say I think you are a villain, Light, just that you could probably make a very good one.”

Light balked and asked, “What, and you couldn’t?”

“Please,” Anna said, waving her hand dismissively, “I lack the suave necessary for such villainous heights.”

“Well, as such an evil person, you should know that there’s no way in hell I’m helping you out,” Light said, perhaps a bit more miffed than he should have been at an off-hand comment, but none the less taking it personally. Probably because no one else would have ever said that, Light was the golden child and always had been, but perhaps more because for whatever reason Anna Jones seemed to know him the best, was perhaps the only real friend he’d ever had.

“No, I didn’t mean it!” Anna Jones pleaded, “Please, Light, seriously, I am getting bullied because of this! Bullied! That’s so pathetic that there aren’t even words for it!”

“Well, what did you expect?” Light asked.

“Clearly not getting bullied over dating some ridiculously good-looking guy that I’m not even dating!” Anna Jones said before crying out to the sky, as if to God himself, “What is wrong with my life?”

“You know, sometimes I wonder if we aren’t living in one of my sister’s mangas,” Light mused, feeling again that twinge of ever present boredom, which had been near overwhelming only a few months ago but none the less creeped into his thoughts every now and then. The thought that this all, his life, was pointless and so very boring.

“What?” Anna asked, which was fair, such philosophical musings were usually her territory, but none the less Light indulged himself.

“Young teenage girl appears out of nowhere in young, extremely attractive, teenage boy’s room…”

“Did you just refer to yourself as extremely attractive?” Anna asked, but Light was not to be deterred as he continued.

“She finds herself at first mildly attracted to him but after a few weeks of suspicion on his part they begin to become friends. He, she believes, despite his beautiful face puts on a show for everyone around him and has no true relationships apart from his family. He’s adored by several female members of his class who she then must battle it out with as their relationship progresses… I’d bet you money that next week, a second love interest will be introduced, one plainer than me but less of a, oh, what do you call it? Jerk with a heart of gold.”

Anna said nothing, even as Light concluded with a small, cheerful, smile, “Of course, being the more attractive of the pair, and the first love interest, ultimately your romantic affections will return to me and you will go about trying to seduce me for the remainder of the school year, which I will resist for some time, secretly not wanting to see my heart hurt, but then my barriers will crumble and come spring time you and I will be skipping together through the sakura trees, hand in hand, gleefully dating.”

Anna stared for far too long of a moment, and finally said, “My god, your ego… There are no words Light, no words.”

“You’ll have to try harder than that if you want to date me by spring, Anna,” Light responded, “Otherwise you will have to settle for my plain, much less captivating, counterpart.”

“Only if you agree to settle for one of the girls in our class and make sure she tells everyone she’s ever met, so that they stop bothering me about it.” Anna paused then, considered this, “Wait a minute, if they think I’m dating someone else… Do you think that would work?”

“Are you actually that desperate?” Light asked with raised eyebrows, watching as the blush overtook her pale features.

“Unfortunately, not really.” Anna said with a drawn out sigh, “Besides, then I’d have to explain our relationship which… I can’t even.”

Good, Light hadn’t suggested it seriously, but he disliked the idea of having to hang around whatever pathetic boy Anna could scrounge up for herself to deflect attention from her relationship with Light. That, and frankly, it would be so insulting and demeaning to both of them.

That said, “Since you’ve brought all this up I feel as if I must warn you, Valentine’s Day, and later White Day, are approaching.”

Anna, who for all her absurd fluency was not too well acquainted with Japanese culture, appeared to have learned enough to fear these two days more than any other. Granted, it was Light who would be swarmed with chocolate for Valentine’s, but certainly on White Day, if he were to present a gift to her, there would certainly be negative attention directed at poor Anna Jones.

According to what Sayu had told him, the world of female intrigue was one of constant psychological warfare and was not for the faint of heart.

“…Should I be afraid?” She finally asked, almost hesitantly.

“Extremely afraid,” Light responded before smiling once again, “Best of luck!”

“I hate you so much sometimes,” Anna responded, tanging her fingers through her hair, “You know what, I hope the plain but less of an asshole guy does show up, maybe if he starts hanging around my popularity will steadily decline and the very idea of us dating would be completely inconceivable.”

She paused, waiting for a response from Light when he had absolutely none to give, and then couldn’t help but ask, “Right, Light? Right? I mean, it can’t get any worse, can it?”

He gave no response, just smiled, and continued to walk home even as she kept pace with him, moodily looking him the eye, and then giving up on him entirely. In other words, hardly all that different from any other day that year.

(Unnervingly and perhaps even ironically, the far plainer man with an interest in Anna Jones did make an appearance, he just didn’t bother to arrive until they reached university, and as he looked like a crack head, perched on chairs like an oversized and top heavy bird, sucked his thumb in public, and openly declared that the only reason he had any interest in her at all was because he was a private detective turned alien hunter in his spare time, needless to say, Anna Jones redacted her hypothetical interest in Light’s romantic rival almost immediately.

And Light, for his own part, couldn’t bring himself to believe that the great detective L, a man he had admired and respected for years, was… this human trash can.)


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Light and Anna go apartment shopping in Tokyo after Light has given up and just accepted Anna Jones as his de facto girlfriend. Anna Jones is unamused and also being stalked by an amateur alien hunter.

There came a time in every man’s life, when he entered top of his class in university, and had to keep an eye on his alien roommate who barely had the decency to acknowledge her extradimensional status, when he had to scrounge through Tokyo for an affordable apartment.

That said, it was still something of a pain.

Most of what it came down to, was inconceivably, his parents had finally caught on that perhaps it was improper that Anna Jones had been staying for years along with Light in the Yagami household. Now, why now of all times was utterly beyond Light. They’d never had an issue after Light and Anna had graduated high school or that first year in university, but somehow, by the second year they had begun to realize that the situation was quite odd.

Ultimately, they’d politely, extremely politely, kicked Anna Jones out of the house. She had actually been quite delighted, not so much about the idea of paying rent and utilities, but had been much less delighted when Light informed her that he too was moving out in order to continue to be her roommate.

Or, as the general population saw them, her long-term perfect boyfriend. The boyfriend that Anna Jones had never, once, appreciated.

“You know, you should be thanking me,” Light noted as they walked in the balmy summer weather towards the next apartment on the list, “You’d never be able to afford an apartment on your own.”

“Light, if we end up getting a studio apartment, because you want to be a cheap bastard who somehow doesn’t see the need for two bedrooms, then I will flay you… And you will sleep on the couch,” Anna Jones said through gritted teeth, trying not even to look at him as she stomped ahead, trying to parse her way through apartment advertisements. Though, to be fair, she had progressed quite well in her studies and was no longer as embarrassingly illiterate as she had been when she arrived.

Though her perfect accent and vocabulary, as well as her miraculous grades and test scores, still grated on him. Not so much because she matched him without even trying, indeed, with divine intervention, but because divine intervention was wasted on her.

Well, that’s what he told himself anyway, a small part of it might have been about the grades.

“Can you afford anything other than a studio apartment?” Light asked, “My parents don’t exactly approve of my living with you so I’m rather tight on money myself.”

“That is not the point!” Anna cried out, actually stopping in the middle of the street, drawing eyes all around as this crazy westerner in a summer dressed railed at Light in perfect Japanese, “The point is that you and I aren’t sharing a bed and we aren’t dating!”

Light just raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, this is all your fault you bastard!” Anna said, actually tearing at her orange hair, “If you just went on a date with someone like a normal person then… What about Takada?”

“Takada?” Light asked, feeling his eyebrows raise higher.

“Sure, Kiyomi Takada, sits next to you in psych, bats her eyelashes at you and tries to say witty things to engage your interest…”

“I know who Takada is,” Light interrupted, crossing his arms now, and he did, and she was… Well, not nearly as intelligent as she thought she was, but people rarely were. She was also rather boring, Light humored her, to an extent, but she hardly held his interest.

Though, no doubt, if he did date her as Anna was suggesting, it’d please his mother.

“Well, you’re smart, she’s smart…” Anna Jones motioned with her hands, bringing them together, as if leaving Light to put two and two together and reach the grand four of him and Kiyomi Takada moving in together.

“Sometimes, Anna, you manage to outdo yourself,” Light said, and then, with a smile, “Don’t you wonder, if sometimes, I’m dating you just to avoid dating the likes of Takada?”

Her eyes widened, she paled, and then, in an almost stunned voice she concluded, “You, Light, are a bastard.”

“Well, I try,” Light said, snatching the advertisements from her hand and walking forward with a satisfied smile on his lips. That wasn’t quite true, he actively tried not to be, and in that way Anna Jones was refreshing. She was companionship without the mask of pleasantry, the ability to be alone without the aching loneliness and ennui, and that, perhaps, more than anything was why this farce continued as it had.

He had never intended to date her, had put no real effort into it, but as it become more and more assumed, by schoolmates, his parents, nearly everyone he just… fell into the role. Until, even to himself, they might as well have been dating, and the idea of her moving out without him was inconceivable.

Now, was this romantic? Light didn’t quite think so, but from the outside at least, there was certainly something there.

“You know, Light, if we’re dating, then you had better start taking me on more interesting dates,” Anna commented, eyes narrowed, looping her arm through as they walked side by side, like any ordinary couple in Tokyo, “Apartment hunting and studying don’t count… I’m talking Space Land, or stupid robot horror films. We have been really lacking on the stupid robot horror films and cheap takeout.”

“Our future television is at your command,” Light responded with a smile, that somehow, wasn’t as fake as it perhaps should have been.

“You’re damn right it is,” Anna said, “And so is the internet, whenever you know, this universe finally gets the internet… I miss Netflix.”

“You say that every week,” Light noted, which only seemed to depress Anna further.

“Yes, but every week I mean it, you don’t understand, Light, Netflix is… It’s life itself.”

And clearly, he didn’t, because every time she brought up the lack of Netflix in this universe it just made him that much more amused. There was always that, somehow, life with an alien never got as boring as he’d thought it would.

“Oh shit,” Anna exclaimed, stopping dead, “Is that… Is that Ryuga Hideki?”

Light stopped with her, because there, across the street, was none other than their fellow top scorer on the entrance exam, the self-declared anonymous detective L who, in between cases, had decided to instead hunt aliens under the pseudonym of Japanese pop star Ryuga Hideki. He looked as hideous as ever, dark hair sticking out at odd angles, pale as a ghost, dressed in that wrinkled long sleeve shirt, the faded blue jeans, and the worn white tennis-shoes. His eyes, as he stared across at them, sticking his thumb in his lips, were black holes.

L, if it really was L, then all Light’s idolizing of the man had fallen to pieces on meeting him in person. Light liked to believe the man was instead one of those eccentric nut jobs who somehow happened to be smart enough to match Light on the test.

He really preferred to believe that.

“Yes, I do believe it is,” was all he managed to say.

Light looked at Anna Jones, Anna Jones looked at Light, they looked back to Ryuga.

“Is it undignified to run?” Anna asked, as L, yes, began to cross the street with a throng of pedestrians and move towards them, like a shark smelling blood in the water.

“In most circumstances, yes,” Light commented as L approached, “In this circumstance, no.”

Without another word Light and Anna booked it from whence they came, rounding corners and shoving pedestrians out of the way, desperately trying to divert the man. Finally, after having moved more than few blocks, they stopped to catch their breath.

“You think we lost him?” Anna asked, brushing sweat from her brow.

“Well, if your hair weren’t so distinctive then I’d say yes,” Light spat out, before looking up and breathing out a sigh of relief, “I don’t see him though so I think we might be…”

“My, my, Anna, Light, my old friends, where are you two running off to in such a hurry?”

“Jesus, shit, Christ!” Anna said as she flew backwards into Light, L hunching right over where she had previously been bent over, appearing like some midday dread apparition.

L paid no mind, instead looked at the ads Light was still holding, a spark appearing in his dull eyes, “Oh, apartment hunting, what a great idea, I’ve been looking for roommates…”

Anna, later, would say that the scream she made in that moment was the sound a man’s heart made when he watched his father slayed by a six-fingered man. Light wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but it certainly was appropriately filled with horror.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for several different 100th review related one shots featuring Light and Anna in a world where Light isn't Kira and Anna is just there... because.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


End file.
